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The blood of poor Americans is now a leading export, bigger than corn or soy

14 points| cow9 | 6 years ago |boingboing.net | reply

5 comments

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[+] larnmar|6 years ago|reply
Colour me skeptical. That certainly doesn’t sound like a plausible number, and the article doesn’t cite any sources.

This article http://www.worldstopexports.com/top-blood-exporters-by-count... total US blood exports at $1.4 billion, a distant second to Ireland. That includes both human and animal blood, and I’m not sure what fractions human.

Soybean exports, on the other hand, are closer to $17 billion a year: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/international-markets-us-tra...

Total US exports are $2.5 trillion, so blood is about 0.06% of that.

Edit: found a couple of reputable sources that put blood plus blood plasma exports in the $20 billion range. Possible that the discrepancy comes from whether plasma is included.

[+] downrightmike|6 years ago|reply
Kind of crazy that they are able to generate off of the bottom half of the US population. So out of the 175 million bottom 50% American population, with the actual donors being much smaller, their actual bodies produce a crazy amount of wealth that they can't capture and remain poor.
[+] surgeryres|6 years ago|reply
I wonder what these for profit companies do with the red cells and platelets? These are both heavily regulated with short shelf lives.